the feudal Counts of Capaccio, besieged and utterly destroyed this stronghold of the mountains that had been the child of Poseidonia of the sea-girt plains. Another and a yet loftier retreat had to be sought by the survivors of the Imperial vengeance, so that the ruined Capaccio the Old was abandoned for another settlement, which still exists as a miserable village amidst those barren hills that had ever looked down with jealous envy upon the proud city with its pillared temples. One curious circumstance with regard to Paestum must finally be mentioned, in that the existence of its ruins, the grandest and most ancient group of monuments on the mainland of Italy, remained unknown to the learned world until comparatively modern times. Only the local peasants and the inhabitants of the poverty-stricken towns in the Lucanian hills seem to have been aware of the presence of the gigantic temples standing in lonely majesty by the shore and as the superstitious nature of these ignorant people attributed these structures to the work of a magician—perhaps to the great wizard Vergil himself—they were shunned both by night and by day as the haunt of malignant spirits. Poor fisher-folk and buffalo-drivers, who had of necessity to pass near the ruined fanes, were wont to slink by in fear and trembling, and doubtless they brought back strange stories of its ghostly occupants with which they regaled their friends or families by the fire-side of a winter’s evening. Yet it is most strange that during the period of the Renaissance, at a time when enthusiastic research was being made into the neglected antiquities of Italy, this unique group of Doric temples should have escaped notice. For neither Cyriaco of Ancona nor Leandro Alberti, who visited Lucania ostensibly for the sake of recording its classical remains, make mention of “the ruined majesty of Paestum,” and it was reserved for a certain Count Gazola (whose name is certainly worthy of being recorded), an officer in the service of the Neapolitan King, to present to the notice of scholars and archaeologists towards the middle of the eighteenth century the first known description of what is perhaps Italy’s chief existing treasure of antiquity. From Gazola’s day onward the beauty and interest of Paestum have been appraised at their true worth, and numberless artists and writers of almost every nationality have sketched or described its marvellous temples.